Each year the Carson Webster Prize is awarded to the Art History undergraduate writing the best departmental honors thesis.

The prize includes a cash award made possible by a memorial fund contributed in memory of Professor J. Carson Webster (1905-1989), former chair of the department and editor of the Art Bulletin (1953-1956). Professor Webster was the second member brought to the newly-created art history program, following Rensselaer Lee (arrived 1931), trained at Princeton as was Lee. He was both a medievalist, publishing The Labors of the Months in Antique and Medieval Art (1938), and a modernist. He was interested in Chicago architecture (and contributing to the first edition of Chicago's Famous Buildings) as well as painting, publishing on Impressionism and the book, Erastus Palmer (1983).

The award is in grateful acknowledgement of his contribution to the department and to the field of Art History in general.

Carson Webster award recipients:

Anju Shivaram (1999)
"'Imagined' Femininities: The Chinese Calendar Woman as National Symbol"

David Mullet (1999)
"Etats Secondaires in Czech Symbolist and Surrealist Art"

Brook Crowley (2001)
“Compassionate Orientalism: Théodore Chassériau’s Arab Horsemen Carrying away Their Dead, 1850”

Dana Atlagic (2002)
“Perpetuating Inequalities: A Look at Happenings Through Gendered Criticism”

David Peterson (2003)
“National Endowment for the Arts v. Karen Finley: Understanding U.S. Government Arts Funding Amidst Controversy, Political Warfare and Ideological Clashes”

Alison Goldstein (2004)
“Dürer versus Raimondi: A Claim of Ownership”

Darrah Doyle and Lauren Wright(2005)
"HIV/AIDS Is Our Concern: An Examination of a Work by Artists of the Chivirika Self-Help Embroidery Project;"
“Time-based to Time-bearing: Temporality in Recent Film and Video Art”